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November 20, 2015

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Insulting words do more damage than a fight

METRO can be a good place for reading, unless little incidences grab your attention, as it happened to me on Wednesday.

Engrossed in a book on a train heading to work, I heard two ladies on my left exchanging words — their voices low at first but raised to a pitch in a matter of seconds. “I accidentally touched you, so what? Why were you so mean?” one of the ladies, who had a northern accent, yelled at the other.

“Was I mean? Did I say anything?” the lady, who had a local accent, shot back.

“Yes you did, you uttered tut-tut in such a condescending manner to me,” the lady from the north said. “Well, I did tut-tut you,” the Shanghai lady shrugged, a bit triumphantly. “So what?”

Until now, both spoke in Mandarin Chinese, albeit with respective accents. Then the Shanghai lady changed into Shanghai dialect, uttering some mean, hateful words, that unlikely made sense to the “provincial” ears. Sensing that the Shanghai lady was cursing them, a man who was accompanying the northern lady but was silent until now, lost his cool and hit the Shanghai lady — on the shoulder. It was more of a push.

Watching all this, an old Shanghainese woman tried to calm the matter. She first persuaded the Shanghai lady to be silent, and then talked to the northerners to calm down. But no sooner had the old woman “negotiated a truce,” than some of the male passengers, who happened to be locals, shot back at the northern guy: “Why did you hit the lady?” A few others added: “You country bumpkin!”

The old Shanghai woman again tried her best to calm things down: “Please don’t pour oil on the flames!”

The northern lady took the initiative to apologize to the Shanghai lady after her friend pushed her, and decided to get down from the train so as not to exacerbate the situation.

As they got down from the train, a male passenger rushed to the door and yelled at them: “Country bumpkin, you!” He was joined by the Shanghai lady, now at the door, screaming: “Country bumpkin!”

I meant to tell her: “Yes, the northern guy was guilty of hitting you, but weren’t you guilty of insulting others in the first place?”

This minor incident speaks volumes about the way the world works around us. Insulting words sometimes hurt people more than a fist does.




 

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